Personal Essay: My Journey To My Life

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember and I love my sketchbook. I love to draw things that I think of, things that I can imagine. I find that my drawings make people happy. I’m currently in Myanmar, and my life has been happy. I’m well educated and I know how fortunate I am, my family is rich, despite living in Rakhine State. I’ve lived here my whole life and now mama says we have to move, I don’t know why, but mama says we’ll be moving to Bangladesh. She thinks I don’t know but I’ve heard my parents talking about leaving, they explain leaving as escaping, I don’t understand that. Life is great here. Now I see why we are leaving. I run, just like my mom told me to, I feel the breeze and the smoke hitting my face, I inhale the fumes whilst I hear the gunshots. One… Two… two gunshots, that could mean two people dead, friends, my

I start to think of before we started our journey, Bangladesh was not familiar, I thought of it as unsafe, but now I have realised that my own country, the one I have grown to love is not the safe beautiful country as I had once thought. Our new life will be great, I say to myself, it will be full of wonder and excitement as mother and I adjust to the new country. Deep down I know that I am scared, despite what I try and tell myself. The thousands of people awaiting entrance to Bangladesh all look traumatized, their eyes are sad and depressed but are somehow hopeful. Their body’s, skinny from malnutrition make me want to look away. But thankfully men and women in blue outfits, come over and hand out food to those waiting to enter into Bangladesh. Everyone is thanking them for the help, I can see how much this to them. A man in a blue shirt comes up to me and gives me food and drink. “Thank you sir, you do not know how much this means to me,” I say. I embrace him like I hugged my mother after papa